Approximately one year after AMD released their Athlon 64 they are about to release their 0.09µm version of the same processor. The transition from 0.13µm to 0.09µm will first happen on the sever market, then the mobile and at last the desktop market.
AMD has as their objective to release 1 million 0.09µm AMD64 processors in the third quarted (June-Sept). It is not only the manufacturing technology which is new with the 0.09µm version but AMD also introduces support for SSE3 and DDR2.
Before all this is going to happen some other changed will happen too. I’m talking about AMD introducing socket 939, and together with that also raising the speed of the HT bus to 1GHz. According to The Inquirer this will not happen by AMD raising the “FSB” and letting the HT bus work at 4*250 MHz as most of people may have thought, but it will instead be so that the HT bus will be “widen” to 5*200MHz.
Unfortunateley it looks like the “more modern” AMD user will have to change mainboards a couple of times this autumn. The only thing that maybe would be of comfort is that Intel is not better, but perhaps they’re just as bad.
The Tech Report has got a link to a very interesting movie about Athlon 64. It is 1 hour and 20 minutes long and gives a good picture of the basics of AMD’s 64bit technology. The whole thing might be an interesting complement to all the reviews, and it can sometimes feel good not having to read.
Sources: VR-Zone, The Inquirer and The Tech Report.
